For the Chiefs, Three Wins Are Little More Than a Good Start

Matt Cassel (7) and the Chiefs are the only undefeated team in the N.F.L. entering Week 5. “We haven’t done anything yet,” General Manager Scott Pioli cautioned.Credit
Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

When Todd Haley was growing up in Pittsburgh, the son of one of the men most responsible for building the Steelers dynasties of the 1970s and 1980s, he used to ride to home games in the back seat of Tom Moore’s car, trying to stay quiet so he would not annoy the reticent Moore, a longtime N.F.L. assistant.

Haley surely learned plenty about personnel from watching his father, Dick, but as the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, Todd Haley has taken to quoting an aphorism he first heard from Moore: “Just get a little better every day.”

Haley struck that theme a lot last week, and not just because on Sunday, the Chiefs will play the Indianapolis Colts, for whom Moore is now a senior offensive assistant and a member of Peyton Manning’s brain trust. The Chiefs are in tapping-the-brakes mode, trying to manage expectations for a team that at 3-0 is improbably the last remaining unbeaten club in the N.F.L.

“We haven’t done anything yet,” Chiefs General Manager Scott Pioli said in a telephone interview last week. “We’ve won three games in a 16-game season. What we wanted to accomplish was, we were going to build a team a certain way with a certain type of player both physically and makeup-wise and try to build something that was going to sustain. And we’re in our infancy.”

Perhaps the Chiefs are merely poster boys for parity. This is the first time since 2001 that there was only one undefeated team left after four games; the Colts and the New Orleans Saints, who were undefeated into Week 15 last season, have already lost.

Kansas City won only four games last year in Haley and Pioli’s turbulent first season, in which they shook the cobwebs from an organization that had grown stale and complacent. But with an enviable draft class providing star power, the Chiefs have sent curiosity and comparisons to the New England Patriots soaring among their devoted and deafening fan base.

The Chiefs’ caution is understandable. After an opening against three teams whose combined record is 3-9, their schedule makes a sharp turn with a trip to Indianapolis followed by a game at Houston next week.

Pioli and Haley have been part of teams that fell somewhere on the spectrum between bad (the Jets of the late 1990s, where both worked for Bill Parcells) and great (the Patriots, where Pioli won three Super Bowls as Bill Belichick’s top personnel executive). In spite of their record, the Chiefs are only ascending from being average to being good.

Still, even Pioli said he was encouraged by the progress the team has made. Three rookies — safety Eric Berry (first round), receiver and returner Dexter McCluster (second) and tight end Tony Moeaki (third) — are significant contributors.

The running game, which began to emerge late last season, is ranked third in the league, at 160.7 yards a game. A made-over offensive line, which allowed 45 sacks last season, has allowed only two so far, and quarterback Matt Cassel acknowledged there was an off-season emphasis on his getting rid of the ball rather than taking sacks.

Photo

Tight end Tony Moeaki is one of three Chiefs rookies making an immediate impact this season.Credit
Joe Robbins/Getty Images

The defense is ranked fifth against the run, allowing 75 yards a game, but the secondary has struggled to stop big pass plays.

The biggest changes, though, have been to the culture of the team. Early last season, the Chiefs were so frustrating, so often lacking in discipline, that Haley became known for occasional fits of rage. Haley said he saw signs of progress late in the season because the players continued to study and run hard despite the poor results.

Last season, Haley, the offensive coordinator for Arizona when the Cardinals reached the Super Bowl after the 2008 season, spent much of his time overseeing the offense. But this year, he has been liberated in part by the hiring of the veteran coordinators Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel, who worked with Pioli on those Patriots Super Bowl teams.

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That has freed Haley to be a coach for the whole team and to ponder motivational ploys like naming 14 veteran players honorary coaches during the bye week, a deft way of giving them rest and lightening the mood while also providing them a different perspective on the team.

“When you go through a year like last year, some of it self-created by me, when you’re trying to give a wake-up call to a bunch of grown men that like doing things one way and you’re trying to get them to do it another way, there’s going to be some pain and suffering involved,” Haley said in a conference call with reporters.

The Chiefs made the playoffs as recently as 2006, but they grew old while trying to make one more run. A drastic youth movement took its toll in 2008, when the Chiefs won only two games and their starting quarterback was Tyler Thigpen, who is now third on the Miami Dolphins’ depth chart.

The former coach Herman Edwards, who is now an ESPN analyst, recalled starting 11 rookies in a game against New England that season. But that youth is now serving the Chiefs well. Linebacker Tamba Hali, Kansas City’s first-round pick in 2006, had three sacks against San Francisco in Week 3. Running back Jamaal Charles, a third-round pick in 2008, is the Chiefs’ leading rusher and third-leading receiver.

“You’ve got to give their staff a lot of credit,” Edwards said last week. “The last two years, a lot of those kids have grown up.”

It is difficult, then, not to view Sunday’s game against Indianapolis as a litmus test for a developing team, particularly because the Colts, who are 2-2 after losing to Jacksonville on a last-second 59-yard field goal, seem more vulnerable than they have in several years. Even Haley said he wanted to see how the Chiefs do in a hostile environment. He would consider it a real accomplishment for the Chiefs to be competitive.

Maybe that is all the Chiefs can hope for this season, too, to hang around in the mix of a weak A.F.C. West. But in a league in which little has gone as expected in the first month, staying close may be enough.

“All it is, is 3-0,” Cassel said. “Now we’re in it for the long haul.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2010, on Page SP3 of the New York edition with the headline: For the Chiefs, Three Wins Are Little More Than a Good Start. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe